SPORTS' REALLY RICH ARE HARDLY LEISURELY.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

``The funniest part is, you actually get paid for this crap!'' a reader e-mailed the other day in a relatively polite critique of something I'd written. ``Not Alex Rodriguez kinda paid, but you're not missing any meals.''

I thought about this as I dined in the luxury to which sportswriters are accustomed, trying not to drip the barbecue sauce from my Chicken McNuggets onto my cleanest pair of Dockers.

I daydreamed about what it might be like to be a ballplayer getting Alex Rodriguez kinda paid. Say I were a .310, 40-home-run-hitting shortstop and I signed a 10-year, $25 million-a-year contract. How might my life go from there?

--Winter before first season of contract: Gain 34 pounds, none of it muscle.

--Spring training: Split fingernail, sit out entire exhibition slate.

--Opening day: Neglect to run out ground ball, ruining ninth-inning comeback.

--Second day: Suffer paper cut in altercation with autograph-seeking toddler, miss 80 games.

--September: Finish season with .216 average, three homers.

--October: Deposit $25 million in interest-bearing account, purchase larger television set, announce retirement from baseball.

This might explain why I never became a great athlete. I lack the passion to play hard, practice tirelessly and live clean for the sake of my craft.

This might also explain why I never became a great actor. Every time I hear about some guy with a nice toupee pulling down $20 million for a movie, I wonder why he'd ever feel the need to do another movie.

The answer is that an actor lives to act. He wouldn't have become a star if all he cared about was the money.

So it is with the Alex Rodriguezes ($252 million, 10 years, Texas Rangers), Kevin Browns ($105 million, seven years, Dodgers), Shaquille O'Neals ($120 million, seven years, Lakers), Troy Aikmans ($85 million, nine years, Dallas Cowboys) and Tiger Woodses of the world.

It's shocking that people are being paid that much money for playing ballgames.

It's even more shocking that people being paid that much money for playing ballgames continue to play hard, even play hurt.

It's a weird thought, but the sports heroes of today are asked to prove something that Lou Gehrig, Joe Louis, Wilt Chamberlain and Rod Laver never did in the era when champions earned paychecks to which the middle class could relate.

Today, they must overcome the temptation to rest not only on their laurels but on their pillow-soft wallets.

This isn't exactly a hardship, of course. And there are sad exceptions.

Chris Antley, the Kentucky Derby winner whose death Dec. 2 in Pasadena remains the subject of a murder investigation, became a relatively wealthy man among his fellow jockeys by investing boldly in tech stocks. But without the need to earn money, he seemed to lose the incentive to compete, and his idle hands reached again for drugs.

But Antley is a different sort of case, like Mike Tyson, another troubled athlete who might have been better off not striking it rich.

Almost to a man (since women have been virtually shut out of sports' big-money club), the recipients of enormous contracts have done right by their employers. If they don't prove to be worth every penny of $100 million, it's not for lack of trying.

O'Neal might be the most pleasing example of all, having broken the bank in 1996, then rounding out his game and leading the Lakers to an NBA championship.

There was a chronology of baseball's ground-breaking salaries in the newspaper not long ago: Nolan Ryan (1 million, 1979), George Foster ($2 million, 1982), Kirby Puckett ($3 million, 1989), Jose Canseco ($4.7 million, 1990), Roger Clemens ($5.4 million, 1991), Ryne Sandberg ($7.1 million, 1992), Ken Griffey Jr. ($8.5 million, 1996), Albert Belle ($11 million, 1996), Pedro Martinez ($11 million, 1997), Mike Piazza ($13 million, 1998), Brown ($15 million, 1999).

Foster never justified his pay. Belle still couldn't manage a smile. Canseco kept getting hurt. But there isn't a slacker in the bunch. Amazing.

Now Rodriguez, who signed his quarter-billion-dollar contract on Monday, takes his turn at the plate against human nature, which suggests it's harder to give your best when you're rich than it was when you were hungry. If he lines one through the box, he'll deserve a special kind of admiration.

When we assume major-league athletes are in it for the money, we may be saying more about ourselves than about them.